Royce Young:

We spent months bracing and preparing for the death of our daughter. But guess what? We weren’t ready.

Especially not with the way it happened.

So here’s the backstory: In December, my wife Keri and I went in for the standard 19-week anatomy scan of our second child. As a parent, you think that appointment is all about finding out boy or girl, but it’s about a whole lot more. In our case, our daughter was diagnosed with a rare birth defect called anencephaly. Some three in 10,000 pregnancies rare. Congratulations to us. The phrase our doctor used in explaining it was “incompatible with life,” which looks as terrible in words as it sounds. The child fails to develop the frontal lobe of the brain, or the top of their skull. The chance of survival is literal zero percent. If you’re Googling it now — first of all, don’t click images — and see a story about a baby that has lived a lengthy time with anencephaly, either the baby doesn’t actually have anencephaly, or it’s being kept alive with every life support function possible. So we sat in a doctor’s office, five months before our daughter was set to be born, knowing she would die.

I had to take a break halfway through reading this story to keep myself from tearing up too much. All I wanted to do when I finished was hug and hold my little boy.

I can’t imagine would it would be like going through what Royce and Keri went through. It is well worth a few minutes of your time to read their amazing story.